LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 BOOKER PRIZE INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER “A tightly wound family drama that reads like a psychological thriller."—NPR “Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams.”—The Boston Globe One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately. Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.

NUBClub recommends Kitamura's surreal drama about an actress and her relationships, but be warned: it's a very weird and very disturbing novel. Audition is split into two parts with a hard separation in the middle that is never explained. The actions of the novel become both very odd and very uncomfortable in places. What hold it together is the protagonist - a talented and ambitious actor in her forties struggling with a difficult but compelling role in a play. Kitamura views the actor through her relationships with her family -- both her literal family as well as the people who come into her life, although the exact nature of all of these relationships is what the novel is problematizing. But even the more plot minded members of NUBClub found the interior ruminations and the strange conversations of the story compelling. Audition in a lot of ways is a kind of surreal domestic horror story, tinged with misogyny against ambitious and talented women and anxiety about what successful relationships are. But all of this is done in such a fresh and unpredictable way that Audition was a deeply compelling read. Saying anything more specific would just spoil the fun. Kitamura has a weird little gem here. It's not a pleasant ride, but it's one NUBClub thinks you should definitely take.